Category: Windows Admin

Installing Windows features (most commonly .NET 3.5 or .NET 2.0) on a Windows 8, 8.1, 10 or Windows Server 2012 (R2) machine, generally requires you to be connected to the internet so that Windows can download the source files from Windows Update. But what happens when you don’t have internet access or if you are sitting behind a proxy and Windows Update is configured to point to WSUS or SCCM?

This post explains various ways to manually specify the source files in order to install the new Windows Feature. You will also learn how to configure the default source file path, so that all future Windows Features will install without any additional user involvement.

Active Directory is awesome, but for it to be effective it needs to be maintained and loved. An important maintenance step is cleanup, which involves removing objects that are no longer in use or required. These include:

User Accounts

Computer Objects

Empty Groups

Empty Organizational Units (OU)

Recently I wrote a guest article for Adaxes to cleanup Active Directory using PowerShell. Along with all of the details and how-to I developed a complete PowerShell toolkit that cleans up your Active Directory environment for you automatically. These tools can be scheduled and can be configured to search a certain scope, exclude certain types of objects and you can also choose the type of processing you want to do when you find inactive AD objects. The options available are report, disable and\or delete.

All of the details and links to the PowerShell scripts to get you started to cleanup Active Directory are available in the article on the Adaxes blog. Clicking on the title of this post will get you there.

One of the most annoying things when using the Export-CSV cmdlet in PowerShell is that the data is never in the order you stored it in. This article solves this problem and changes your life in the process!

The PowerShell execution policy is a good feature from a security perspective, but in most cases it is just plain annoying, especially when running scripts from Group Policy, Task Scheduler, or some other sort of remote mechanism. This article shows you how to bypass the PowerShell execution policy on a machine so that you can run your script on a system irrespective of what execution policy is set.

In most cases, PowerShell makes easy work out of working with the registry and its various components. However, it isn’t as easy if you want to enumerate & search registry key values. I was faced with this situation recently, so here is the solution I came up with.

If you have Windows Firewall enabled then chances are that eventually you are going to find that it will be blocking one or more ports required by your applications. Checking Windows Firewall for blocked ports will help you troubleshoot your issues.

To check if Windows Firewall is blocking a port(s) that your machine is trying to communicate, follow the steps below…